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Morrissey has won the 23rd annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his first novel, List of the Lost. The former lyricist and lead singer of The Smiths saw off vibrant competition from six other shortlisted writers, including Erica Jong, author of this year’s Fear of Dying, a follow-up to her seminal 1973 novel Fear of Flying, and George Pelecanos, the celebrated screenwriter of The Wire, whose novella The Martini Shot came out in January.

Morrissey’s novel, List of the Lost, is about four relay runners at a Boston college in the Seventies, cursed by their accidental killing of an old man one night in the woods. It was widely panned by reviewers; the Telegraph's Charlotte Runcie thought it "terrible". The scene that particularly commended his novel to the Bad Sex Award judges involves Ezra, one of the runners, and Eliza, his girlfriend.

In this now-famous passage, Morrissey conceived of their union as “a giggling snowball of full-figured copulation” which became “a clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation”, during which “Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth”; his “bulbous salutation”, in a “pained frenzy”, “whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”.

Morrissey was unable to attend the ceremony on Monday night at the In & Out Club in St James’s Square, London, due to touring commitments, but a crowd of 400 toasted him warmly. The prize was conferred by the lawyer and columnist Nancy Dell’Olio.

Nancy Dell'Olio

Although Morrissey was not available for comment on the day, subtle readers of List of the Lost would have known in advance what the singer was likely to have said. As a line from his novel explains “Sex was always there – everywhere photographically, in print, in film, so expansively thought about that almost nothing more could need to be said about it.”

Also on the Bad Sex shortlist were George Pelecanos, whose novella The Martini Shot is notable for the line: “She stroked my pole and took off my briefs, and I got between her and spread her muscular thighs with my knees and rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide.”

Erica Jong's latest novel, Fear of Dying contains the following scene: “He opens my silk robe and touches my c--- as if he were Adam just discovering Eve’s p----”.

Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers attracted attention with an appetizing run of culinary language that takes a biblical turn: “Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in the hyssop – Psalms were about to pour out of me.”

Richard Bausch was shortlisted for Before, During, After, in which a sexual scene concludes with the phrases: “It went on. It was very good.”

Lauren Groff, meanwhile, author of Fates and Furies, was mentioned for her line: “Lotto … the most abstract imaginings of a girl – footprints of a sandpiper like a crotch, gallons of milk evoking boobs”.

Finally, Tomas Espadal was shortlisted for a raucous scene between Héloïse and Abélard, in which “She rides above him the way she’d imagined that one day she’d ride a boy, a man, a beast”.

Last year’s recipient of the Bad Sex Award was Ben Okri for Age of Magic.

The prize was established in 1993 by Auberon Waugh to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant sexual scenes in modern fiction, and to discourage them.